Mr. Ben: Perley Poore was appointed by the Governor of Massachusetts, in May, 1845, to select and transcribe such documents in the French archives as he might find to bear upon the early history of Massachusetts and the relations of New England with New France. His report to the Governor, Dec. 28, 1847, accompanied by letters from John G. Palfrey and Jared Sparks, telling the story of his work, constitutes Senate Doc., no. 9 (1848), Mass. Documents. His transcripts, covering papers from the discovery to 1780, fill ten volumes in the Archives of the State, and are accompanied by two volumes of engraved maps. Mr. Poore, under the auspices of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and with the pledge of Colonel William P. Winchester to assume the expense if necessary, had already a year earlier begun his work. M. Davezac was at that time chef des archives of the Marine, and the confusion which Brodhead, the agent of New York, had earlier found among the papers had disappeared under the care of the new custodian. From other departments as well as from other public and from private sources, Mr. Poore increased his collection, and added to it water-color drawings and engraved prints of an illustrative nature; but unfortunately many of the documents cited are given by title only, and the blank pages left to be filled are still empty. It is these papers which have been copied within a year or two for the Government of the Province of Quebec.
The manuscript collections of Mr. Parkman are very extensive, and are still in his house; the more important of his maps, however, have been transferred to the College Library at Cambridge, and these have been sketched elsewhere in the present volume. The Editor is under great obligations to Mr. Parkman for unrestricted access to his manuscripts. They consist of large masses of miscellaneous transcripts, with a few original papers, and so far as they come within the period of the present volume, of the following bound series:—
I. Acadia, in three volumes. These are transcripts made by, or under the direction of, Mr. Ben: Perley Poore, and in considerable part supplement the collection made by Mr. Poore for the State of Massachusetts.
II. Correspondance officielle, in five volumes, coming down to 1670, being transcripts from the French archives.
III. Canada, in eight volumes, covering 1670-1700, being transcripts from the French archives, and supplementing Brodhead’s Colonial Documents of New York, vol. ix.
C. Bibliography.—Harrisse’s Notes, etc., is the latest of the general bibliographies of the history and cartography of New France; and this with his Cabot constitutes a complete, or nearly so, indication of the sources of Canadian history previous to 1700. Charlevoix in 1743 prefixed to his Nouvelle France a list of authorities as known to him, and characterized them; and this is included in Shea’s translation. Of the modern writers, Ferland and Faillon in their introduction each make note of their predecessors. The work of G. B. Faribault, Catalogue d’ouvrages sur l’histoire de l’Amérique, et en particulier sur celle du Canada, avec des notes, Quebec, 1837, containing nine hundred and ninety-six titles, besides maps, etc., has lost whatever importance its abounding errors left for it formerly. There is a biographical sketch (1867) of Faribault in the Abbé Casgrain’s Œvres, vol. ii. Cf. Morgan’s Bibliotheca Canadensis, p. 118. H. J. Morgan’s Bibliotheca Canadensis, Ottawa, 1867, includes the writers on Canadian history who have published since the conquest of 1759.
From this book and other sources the following enumeration of the various general histories of Canada, compendious as well as elaborate, and including such as cover a long interval in a general way, is taken:—
Excepting one volume of a projected History of Canada, by George Heriot, published in London in 1804, and which was an abridgment of Charlevoix, the earliest of modern works is The History of Canada from its first Discovery to 1796, by William Smith, published in Quebec in 1815. The author was a son of the historian of New York.
There was published in Paris in 1821, in a duodecimo of 512 pages, a sketchy compendium by D. Dainville,—Beautés de l’histoire du Canada, ou époques remarquables, traits intéressans, mœurs, usages, coutumes des habitants du Canada, tant indigènes que colons, depuis sa découverte jusqu’à ce jour.
In 1837 Michael Bibaud published at Montreal a Histoire du Canada sous la domination Française. A second edition was published in 1845. In 1844 appeared his Histoire du Canada et des Canadiens sous la domination Anglaise. This author also published a Bibliothèque Canadienne, a monthly magazine, which for several years gathered and preserved considerable documentary material.